There’s always a little trouble. Some lad from New York’s midtown or Chicago decides to make himself a score for ten thousand or so with a touch of blackmail or extortion. “Call Bill Oxford. He’ll handle it. The kid’s tough and smart and he knows everybody.”

Bill Oxford is tough as nails and not very nice. He used to be a hot shot newsman during the war, worked on the legendary military paper Yank with people like Marion Hargrove (See Here Private Hargrove, well known screen and television writer), then, still young, he went to the city, got a job as a ‘sharpshooter’ on a big paper, the kind of guy who knew people and things, the kind of guy who would put a blackmailer or extortionist in their place for you, fix a scandal, break a few skulls. Then he went to work in advertising for the Agency, for Roger Mooney …With Roger Mooney you say, ‘Sure, Roger,’ and jump through whatever hoops he’s holding.

Roger Mooney has a client running for office in Balboa, California. He’s not a very good candidate, in fact he’s a very bad one, and he has some problems, namely an honest lawyer named Ringling Black, who has the goods on the client and is about to broadcast them. All Bill Oxford has to do is fix things.

“You go down to Balboa. Frame this Black. Frame him hard and fast. Maybe with a woman. Something like that, something plenty nasty.”

You don’t have to be all that clever to figure out this is a paperback original from Gold Medal by the underrated John MacPartland, whose books like Big Red’s Daughter, The Kingdom of Johnny Cool, and Tokyo Doll were hardboiled in the vein of John D. MacDonald or Charles Williams — not just a rehash of Hammett, Chandler, and Cain, but a new vision of the hard-boiled nineteen fifties, suburban rather than urban, small town or small city politics instead of Chi town or NYC.

MacPartland’s mean streets were often in such settings. His prose was hard and tight with flourishes of dark beauty, but never showy:

Two women called to me, “Bill!” Nile’s voice and Ann’s. I walked along the night-black street alone.

Outside it was cool and dark with a fresh wind from the bay. I left the car in the parking lot and walked toward the couple of blocks that were downtown Balboa.

Downstairs for a drink at the bar. It was crowded now, and there was the laughter of women, the low voices of men. A good bunch — the women all beautiful or close to it, the men rich-man brown and with good clothes.

I went to her, quietly, and put my arms around her, hunted her mouth with mine. She pushed at me with her hands, tried to say something, and then I found her. It was stepping out of reality into something I had never known before. This was the whirlpool.

Sometimes I would try to say something, a fragment of a word, a quick whisper of “Nile!” Nothing else. The drunkenness burned away, and I forgot everything but Nile.

There was no exhaustion, no satiety. In time, a long time, there was a gray light on the long row of windows, a rim of light over the roundness of the hills.

There are two women, Nile Lisbon, widow of well loved John Lisbon, friend of Ringling Black, girlfriend of tough sadistic King McCarthy, and Balboa’s assistant district attorney, a woman too dangerous to be with and too beautiful to ignore. In anyone else’s hands Nile would be a femme fatale, in MacPartland’s she is bruised and lost and hard to resist, good and bad, sweet and sour. You would know Nile if you saw her, be attracted, but unless you were Bill Oxford you would likely back away:

She was the kind of woman a man noticed, mostly because of her eyes. Dark, almost black pools, they had a warmth that I felt could turn to fire. She had turned her head, looking over the shoulder of the man she was with, and we looked at each other. The third or fourth time it happened he noticed it and I paid some attention to what he was like.

Nile gets Oxford in a fight with King the first thing. It doesn’t seem to bother him much. Then there is Ann Field. Six years earlier there at been a thing between them:

Yeah, sure, Ann. Cute and trim as a palomino colt, that girl.

Not now though. Ann has changed and how she feels about Bill has changed:

Now she was sleek, a jungle animal who’d been caught and caged in a filthy zoo too long, the kind of girl who describes herself as a model but who does no modeling. Her eyes weren’t wide, nor was the world new and good to her. Any man could see all that.

Ann doesn’t have good memories of Bill: “Don’t hello me, you son-of-a-bitch. I’ll kill you and spit on your corpse.”

Then to round things out there are the hard drunk kids in town for spring break and Mooney’s enforcer Whitey D’Arcy, who owns a car dealership and owns more than a few cops. Mooney and D’Arcy play hard:

Mooney had used hired killers where it had been necessary years ago. California had been a rough state in the late 1930’s. The chips were down for Mooney today.

Whitey D’Arcy was not an idiot. We both knew what it was about. If I gave him trouble I’d pay for it, hard, but not here and not now. Likely I’d get my kidneys broken; it was the number-one big payoff for trouble guys.

Bill finds himself suddenly with a conscious and a need to pay back for his sins. Redemption could get him killed when Ringling Black is shot and the evidence against Mooney’s client goes missing. The cops work for D’Arcy and want Bill, and his only allies are the seductive Nile and the wounded Ann.

Maybe the ending is a little sentimental. Maybe it should have been harder and with less hope, more Woolrich’s doomed fate haunted heroes or one of David Goodis hopeless losers, Jim Thompson’s amoral heroes would have handled things differently.

I like how MacPartland ends it. He writes hard-boiled movie prose and writes well. You can hear the music rise and see John Payne or Robert Mitchum and maybe Liz Scott or Gloria Grahame walk away, a little less hard, a bit wiser, a touch more human than they began:

Ann and I left the Hut and walked toward the ocean. We could hear the music and the young voices of the nine days of Easter through the night.

The roar of the long combers breaking into the surf was loud and the moon was rising in silver over the sea blackness. “This is what I wanted to do with you six years ago, Bill. Walk along the dunes and wait for the night to end.”

“We can do it now, Ann. It’s not too late for us.”

Maybe it is, maybe not, MacPartland clearly likes the idea they can be saved, but he hasn’t sugar coated who Ann is or what Bill was. He has portrayed them as who they were, shown us what they could do and did do. He’s taken us down darker and meaner streets than the romantic private knights of Chandler or the tough birds Hammett gave us. These streets are inhabited by people we know and people we saw in the towns we lived in. Those of us who worked on newspapers or advertising knew the Bill Oxfords of the world. Some of us have known Nile Lisbon and Ann Field in one guise or another.

If you worked in advertising you knew Roger Mooney, maybe not quite so lethal, and you surely knew of Whitey D’Arcy if you never knew him personally if you grew up in a certain size city.

The Face of Evil, sometimes it is in a mirror, sometimes it is someone we know, a power broker like Mooney, a big fish in a small pool like D’Arcy, sometimes a bully like King. Sometimes it is just the corruption of small town America. John MacPartland captures the loss of innocence, the yearning for something that never really was, the hope of redemption, and the cost of making a stand finally.

This isn’t a great book, but it’s a very good one. It will keep you up to finish in a single reading and leave you satisfied. It’s one of those Gold Medal novels that you recall with real fondness and if you write yourself a touch of awe. Maybe he isn’t in the very first rank, but he isn’t far off it either. It’s nice to read a book once in a while that just reaffirms why you started reading in this genre in the first place. There are times you don’t want a masterpiece, just a master at his best.

2 RESPONSES TO “REVIEWED BY DAVID VINEYARD: JOHN MCPARTLAND – THE FACE OF EVIL.”

From Time Magazine‘s Milestones : “Died. John McPartland, 47, husky, bushy-haired chronicler of suburban sex foibles (No Down Payment), successful freelance journalist; of a heart attack; in Monterey, Calif. McPartland, who once wrote, “Sex is the great game itself,” lived as harum-scarum a life as any of his characters, had a legal wife and son at Mill Valley, California, a mistress at Monterey who bore him five children and who, as “Mrs. Eleanor McPartland,” was named the city’s 1956 “Mother of the Year.” Later, McPartland’s legal widow submitted the daughter of an unnamed third woman as one of the novelist’s rightful heirs. (9/14/58)”

Monday, June 29, 2015

> 1. Have you always wanted to write or was there an event that lead you to writing?

I always loved to write . . . and draw . . . and actand direct. In grade school I wrote and "produced" plays and created a neighborhood newsletter. I tried writing Hollywood to get a movie made of my favorite book, quick, before I outgrew the role of the 8-year-old girl. In Desert and Wildernessby Noble-winning novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz did become a movie decades later, but in Poland. Was I ahead of my time!

Nowadays, young talent can break out from home computer podcasts and YouTube posts. Then . . the common wisdom was no one could make a living at any of the arts. So adults were discouraging.

I majored in theater in college anyway,(double major in English Lit ), but on graduation, I was lucky to land a flunky job in the local daily newspaper's advertising department.(An employment agency told me I could be a tutor for the Famous Writers' School, which I thought would constitute fraud on my part and theirs. . . )

I was loved my job, put out a monthly ad newsletter . . . then I saw an unfairly negative theater review. Indignant, and to be fair, I took a lunch hour to see if I could review another play I'd seen on deadline. A friend suggested I show it to the intimidating managing editor. He growled, but bought it instantly for five dollars! He mentored me, and within six months I was the only reporter there hired without a journalism degree.

Fast-forward ten years. I was impacting the glass ceiling daily, my refused story ideas showing up on 60 Minutes six months later. (When Garrison Keillor's first Lake Wobegon book came out I wanted to interview him, but was told he'd "had enough publicity." Eyes rolling.)

When an editor gutted an article I thought was national magazine-level, I enrolled in a YWCA writing course to learn the how-to-submit to national magazines information in a social setting. I was ridiculed for taking a "rinky-dink" class when I had a metropolitan daily newspaper byline.

I didn't know class members read from projects. Inspired by the creative ideas of these despised "amateurs," I dug out the first chapter of novel I'd started in college to read.

When I finished, after a long, stunned silence, the instructor, children's author Judy Delton, said, "Get out of this class and finish that novel!" A couple years later Amberleigh sold, thanks to Garson Kanin taking it to his publishers, and became my first New-York published novel of sixty. Thank you Judy and classy classmates. And Garson, forever!

> 2. When you first began to write the Midnight Louie Mystery Series did you envision that you would one day be releasing the 23rd installment? Now 27th!

I knew Midnight Louie had the right stuff to be a long-running character so I surrounded him with a character-rich human cast: two men; two women; two pro and two amateur detectives. After finishing the ninth book I realized it was "the season ender" and I was writing a three-year ensemble TV show.

Thealphabet title pattern was set only with the third book (B as in Blue Monday), so I'd fearlessly committed to 27 books. There'll be 28. The 27th, Cat in a Zebra Zoot Suit comes out Aug. 25 in print, digital, and audiobook. The final book will be Cat in an Alphabet Endgame in August, 2016. Then there's Louie's new series. Readers have been publicly mourning his alphabetic demise for the past few years. What's a mother of invention to do?

Louie is to me what Archy, the typing cockroach, was to newspaper columnist Don Marquis, a wry commentator on human foibles, only Louie is also a homage and critique of that American icon, the male noir PI. (Archy's best pal is Meh itabel the alley cat, of course. )

My goal was to create a parallel feline universe that satirizes the human one in both normal life (in abnormal Las Vegas) and in the mystery/crime genre, to provide murder mysteries in each book, and to follow four thirty-something characters coming to terms with issues from their pasts and in the murder cases they solve, such social issues as women in the workplace, domestic abuse, unwed motherhood, birth control (also a cat issue along with homelessness), celibacy and sexual addiction, religious and ethnic hatred, mob-related crime, sex, lies, and trust, etc. etc. Oh, and humor too.

> 3. For someone new to your series, do the books need to be read in order or is each a stand alone book?

Each book's main murder mystery is stand-alone, but the series is richer if you read it all in order because rereaders (and many fans tell me they do that) will discover clues in early books to situations that develop much later. I love characters that grow (or trip themselves) in unexpected ways and I love to wrap mysteries within mysteries.

One reader called it "the epic Midnight Louie cat mystery series." Continuing character arcs and even unsolved murders abound. I took some flack for that, so halfway through did what TV series do, prefaced books with "Previously in Midnight Louie's Lives and Times". Reading from the beginning will be much easier by New Year's, when all the earlier books will be available in ebook. The series order is listed in my annual newsletter, available in e-mail or snail mail format at http://www.carolenelsondouglas.com, also on the website Louie area.

> 4. How do you go about doing research for your books?

Midnight Louie and his noir detective voice belong in a city with nightlife and chorus girlsand crime and entertainment, like Damon Runyon's Depression Broadway tales, another inspiration for Louie's voice, character, and arena of operation. I'd have never visited Las Vegas (honest) if I'd hadn't had to research it for the books since 1985, when it was a sleepy town compared to the massive entertainment mecca of today. I now keep up-to -date with occasional visits and via the Internet.

So the Vegas background morphs with changes since 1991, while the storyline only covers two or so years. Midnight Louie is a fantasy construct in a bad human behavior world. I reserved the right to be whimsical about time in Louieland, as well as serious about the social issues. I'm very pleased they've remained relevant, especially terrorism (IRA) and Irish girls imprisoned in brutal Magdalene asylums for unwed mothers. When Dame Judi Dench recently filmed the Oscar-nominated Philomena on that topic, I could fold mention of the film right into a long-running character arc and subplot. I'm still the crusading reporter, wanting to inform on social atrocities.

I've sometimes created fictional Vegas elements that came about later, like the interior lobby canal with gondolas called the "Love Moat" in an early book. First the Luxor, and now the Venice, has one. No royalties for me on that, though. :)

> 5. Is research a fun part of writing or just a part of the process?

I love research. I'm looking for the incredibly fascinating obscure weird fact nobody knows I can work a whole book and mystery around, and they are always there to be found. Cat in a Zebra Zoot Suit has one of those.

> 6. If you could go back and do one thing differently at the beginning of your writing career,

what would it be?

>

I've only recently concluded that I moved to the wrong Sunbelt state when leaving Minnesota 30 years ago to write full time. We considered North Carolina and Texas. Publishing is an East Coast-centric industry. With nearby East Coast corridor access , I could have stayed on top of what happened to my books, and a lot of bad, stupid things can happen to books inside publishing houses. My third book was a "sleeper" national Top 25 mixed fiction and nonfiction bestseller in a series on the brink of the New York Times list. Within three years, three editors at two publishing houses managed to ruin the "gift" of momentum. I was forced to change genres to survive, and lucky to do so.

Some things that were "a problem" then have proved advantageous now. I always used my own name, no matter the genre, and blended genres somewhat. Writing an Irene Adler Sherlockian historical novel and aMidnight Louie novel every year challenged the publishers' sales force and booksellers, who had trouble categorizing a literary chameleon differently every six months. I was asked to stop the Adlers for a time, and did for seven years .

Nowadays, they call using the same name "being a brand " and now there are onscreen "shelves" where everything I did and will do is together at long last.

B moving on when I encountered barriers, I developed more aspects of my writing, with the result that I've written books and stories in pretty much every genre, including "mainstream" and horror.

I've now moved on to self-publishing, although my publisher offered a tempting advance. Now that eBooks give all writers a literary "legacy" for 70 years after their death, I want to get my 62 books so far in order for my own satisfaction. I'm doing all the writing, acting, producing I did as a child within my books and have put out an annual newsletter in print and now also digital since 1995. I'm even "drawing", by designing my own covers. Thanks to all the things that "went wrong" on my publishing path, I have a huge backlist, and a truly silver lining.

Sunday, June 28, 2015

Fresh Meat: Elimination by Ed Gorman

Elimination by Ed Gorman is the final political thriller in the Dev Conrad series where the investigator must figure out who tried to kill a Congress member running for re-election(available July 1, 2015).

It seems possible that my lifelong interest in the American political process is what drew me to read Sleeping Dogs, the first in the political mystery series featuring Dev Conrad, a seasoned political consultant with a background as an investigator for the U. S. Army.

But I freely admit that the appeal for me was the author’s name: Ed Gorman. I’d been a Gorman groupie for years, and the thought of a new series written by the master of mystery, horror, and westerns had me running to the nearest bookstore. Every few years over the past decade, a new Dev Conrad book would be released, bringing the combined allure of politics and murder. I relished each one.

Still, many of my favorite series have come to an end and this one is no exception. I must confess that I had more than one tear in my eye when I finished reading Elimination, the final mystery in the Dev Conrad series.

When the story opens, Dev’s political consulting firm is engaged in securing the re-election of Congress Member Jessica Bradshaw. Her opponent, Michael Dorsey, and his supporters are far to the right of Bradshaw’s positions, and the fight promised to be a strenuous one. Dev fears the worst right before a scheduled debate between the two candidates.

We’d heard rumors that men (and maybe women) with guns would show up that night to protest against the appearance of our congresswoman, who had apparently just returned from ‘Islamia’ where she’d learned how to implement Sharia law and had helped to plan the ultimate invasion of Islamists on the red, white and blue soil of the USA.

Sure enough, before the auditorium was full, before the debate even had a chance to begin, the trouble started. But trouble is something Dev Conrad takes in stride. He only hopes that there will be no real damage done:

I heard the shouting before I was able to see, far down the wide central lane, what was going on. A pair of men toting AK-47s were walking fast toward the building. They were being pursued by another pair of men, these two happening to be police officers.

Let the drama begin.

Once the police had the men and their guns well in hand, Dev turned his focus on the audience and the debate. He was pleased with the performance of his candidate, but her opponent’s behavior irritated Dev to no end, and he defined it with deep political cynicism.

The son of a bitch never managed to answer a question straight on; in boxing that was called slipping a punch. In politics that was called making your case.

With his candidate coming out of the debate looking like a winner, Dev takes a few hours off for drinks with a campaign colleague but his respite doesn’t last too long—someone has taken a shot at Congress Member Bradshaw. Rumors quickly circulate that the shooting was a set-up, a plan to round up sympathy for the candidate.

Then the weapon is found in the car of a campaign intern, a kid who Dev believes couldn’t possibly have anything to do with any political chicanery. Dev plunges in; ready to use his finely hones skills, both political and investigative to find out what is really going on.

This is politics so nothing is as it seems, and no person is exactly who he pretends to be. Through it all, the one person you can count on to be true to his own personal code of ethics is Dev.

Elimination is Ed Gorman at his finest. The writing is sharp, the tone is witty, and the people are exactly what they should be—political beings who we can’t quite like and can’t quite hate. Dev Conrad leaves us on an extremely high note.

With a tear and a smile I say goodbye to Dev Conrad. But we have a new cycle of Presidential election politics staring us in the face, so I am sure that I will speculate “what would Dev think” more than once between now and November 2016.

Fresh Meat: Elimination by Ed Gorman

Elimination by Ed Gorman is the final political thriller in the Dev Conrad series where the investigator must figure out who tried to kill a Congress member running for re-election(available July 1, 2015).

It seems possible that my lifelong interest in the American political process is what drew me to read Sleeping Dogs, the first in the political mystery series featuring Dev Conrad, a seasoned political consultant with a background as an investigator for the U. S. Army.

But I freely admit that the appeal for me was the author’s name: Ed Gorman. I’d been a Gorman groupie for years, and the thought of a new series written by the master of mystery, horror, and westerns had me running to the nearest bookstore. Every few years over the past decade, a new Dev Conrad book would be released, bringing the combined allure of politics and murder. I relished each one.

Still, many of my favorite series have come to an end and this one is no exception. I must confess that I had more than one tear in my eye when I finished reading Elimination, the final mystery in the Dev Conrad series.

When the story opens, Dev’s political consulting firm is engaged in securing the re-election of Congress Member Jessica Bradshaw. Her opponent, Michael Dorsey, and his supporters are far to the right of Bradshaw’s positions, and the fight promised to be a strenuous one. Dev fears the worst right before a scheduled debate between the two candidates.

We’d heard rumors that men (and maybe women) with guns would show up that night to protest against the appearance of our congresswoman, who had apparently just returned from ‘Islamia’ where she’d learned how to implement Sharia law and had helped to plan the ultimate invasion of Islamists on the red, white and blue soil of the USA.

Sure enough, before the auditorium was full, before the debate even had a chance to begin, the trouble started. But trouble is something Dev Conrad takes in stride. He only hopes that there will be no real damage done:

I heard the shouting before I was able to see, far down the wide central lane, what was going on. A pair of men toting AK-47s were walking fast toward the building. They were being pursued by another pair of men, these two happening to be police officers.

Let the drama begin.

Once the police had the men and their guns well in hand, Dev turned his focus on the audience and the debate. He was pleased with the performance of his candidate, but her opponent’s behavior irritated Dev to no end, and he defined it with deep political cynicism.

The son of a bitch never managed to answer a question straight on; in boxing that was called slipping a punch. In politics that was called making your case.

With his candidate coming out of the debate looking like a winner, Dev takes a few hours off for drinks with a campaign colleague but his respite doesn’t last too long—someone has taken a shot at Congress Member Bradshaw. Rumors quickly circulate that the shooting was a set-up, a plan to round up sympathy for the candidate.

Then the weapon is found in the car of a campaign intern, a kid who Dev believes couldn’t possibly have anything to do with any political chicanery. Dev plunges in; ready to use his finely hones skills, both political and investigative to find out what is really going on.

This is politics so nothing is as it seems, and no person is exactly who he pretends to be. Through it all, the one person you can count on to be true to his own personal code of ethics is Dev.

Elimination is Ed Gorman at his finest. The writing is sharp, the tone is witty, and the people are exactly what they should be—political beings who we can’t quite like and can’t quite hate. Dev Conrad leaves us on an extremely high note.

With a tear and a smile I say goodbye to Dev Conrad. But we have a new cycle of Presidential election politics staring us in the face, so I am sure that I will speculate “what would Dev think” more than once between now and November 2016.

Friday, June 26, 2015

Forgotten Books: Stranger At Home--NOW AVAILABLE IN A SNAZZY PB FORMAT FROM STARK HOUSE

Way back in the Fifties I read one half of an Ace Double mystery novel called Stranger At Home. I really took to it. The writing was swift, dramatic, elegant. Supposedly it was written by the actor George Sanders. But even in my early teens, clueless as I was, I just assumed he hadn't written it. I'd read here and there about "ghosted" books.The real writer turned out to be Leigh Brackett. I've mentioned this novel before because it's a fine whodunit set in the Hwood of the late Forties. For its time it's a blunt novel. Not even the protagonist Michael Vickers is much of a hero. The story centers on Vickers returning from the dead--one of his three friends (or maybe all of them) pushed him off the boat they were sailing on). Drunk, he nearly drowned. But he survived to return a few years later to find out what had happened to him that drunken night. He doesn't have amnesia, he just can't recall the moment he was pushed off the boat.For years there were rumors that Brackett had farmed the book out but I don't think so. The writing is purely hers. Those sweeping sentences, those atmospherics, those bitter unhappy people. You find them in her science fantasy, her westerns, her mysteries. If there's an influence here it's Raymond Chandler, one of her idols. The difference is that Vickers, unlike Philip Marlowe, doesn't observe everything at one remove. He goes through the novel trying to find the culprit--and learning in the process what an arrogant ruthless bastard he was to those around him.The book opens on a party scene that I'd out up against any party scene I've encountered in fiction sin a long time. Brackett must have known a lot of drunks because she gets them down just right.Even though it was work for hire this is a book that belongs on the Brackett shelf. It's one of her finest novels.

GRAVES' RETREAT /

NIGHT OF SHADOWS by Ed Gorman

from Ben Boulden on Gravetapping I don’t write as much about
Stark House Press as I should. It is a fantastic publisher that specializes in
reprinting great novels from the paperback golden age—by Harry Whittington, Clifton Adams, Gil Brewer, Day Keene, etc.—great novels from the more recent
past— by Bill Pronzini, Robert J. Randisi, Ed Gorman—and even a handful of original titles—by Charlie Stella, Dana King, Jada M. Davis.

Stark House’s most recent
release is a double novel featuring two superb historical mysteries—both were
originally marketed as Westerns, but “historical mystery” is a much better fit—titled
Graves’ Retreat and Night of Shadows. The setting, for both,
is Cedar Rapids, Iowa of the late-Nineteenth century, and it is described with
an admiring and sentimental hand—

“[A]
place the mayor called, with monotonous determination, ‘the Chicago of Iowa.’”

Graves’
Retreat was originally published in 1989 by the long gone Doubleday
Western imprint Double D. The year is 1884. Baseball is fashionable across the
country, and Cedar Rapids is no different. It has a municipal team providing
thrills and trying to keep up with the frequent rule changes—

“It was
not an easy game to play because the rules kept changing. It was those goddamn
Easterners.”

The star is a young pitcher and
bank teller named Les Graves. Les is building a good life, and would rather
keep his past secret. His brother, T. Z., is a professional thief, and a few
years earlier Les helped T. Z. rob a bank. Now T. Z. has found Les in Cedar
Rapids and wants help robbing Les’ employer. To make matters worse Cedar Rapids
is playing the best baseball team in the Midwest—Sterling, Illinois—on July 4th,
and Les has a history of nerves. A history that kept him out of the big
leagues.

Graves’
Retreat is everything one expects from an Ed Gorman crime
novel—clever, appealing, human, and sharp. The story is awash with blackmail,
cold-blooded murder, and romance. Les isn’t a typical, larger-than-life,
protagonist. He is scared and lost. He fears losing his Cedar Rapids life, his
brother, and terrified of losing to Sterling. There are moments when the
outcome, and Les’ role in it, are in doubt, and the climax is unexpected. The
prose is Ed Gorman’s usual literate, tender, and tough style. My favorite line
is the description of a Sterling pitcher named Fitzsimmons—

“He had
a shanty-Irish face, which meant he managed to look innocent and mean at the
same time, and he had a smile he must have practiced as often as he did his
fast ball.”

Night
of Shadows was originally published in 1990 by Double D. The year is
1894. The Cedar Rapids constabulary is expecting the arrival of an aging former
lawman and gunfighter named Stephen Fuller. Fuller is visiting a dying childhood
friend, and to avoid any trouble the police chief wants his visit short. A
young police matron—

“Matrons
were not, strictly speaking, constables. True, matrons carried badges. True,
matrons had the power to arrest. True, matrons were summoned to impose law and
order during times of emergency. But they rarely worked outside the jail and even more rarely participated in the apprehension of criminals.”

—named Anna Tolan convinces the
boss she is both capable and the best choice to escort Fuller around town. Anna’s
job is to keep him out of trouble, but it doesn’t go smoothly. Fuller—an
alcoholic and drunken storyteller of the highest order—wanders into a bar, having
lost Anna, and finds neck deep trouble. He is the only suspect in the murder of
a man who called him a liar (and threw whiskey in his face). He bolts the
scene, leaving Anna, who is the only person in town that believes his
innocence, to find the real killer, and clear his name.

Night
of Shadows is something special. It is a police procedural featuring
blackmail and murder, but it also has an unexpected element for a Western. A
psychopath with a mother complex. It is reminiscent of Robert Bloch’s novel Psycho, and, as Mr. Gorman explains in the
Introduction, it is an homage; and one Mr. Bloch approved. It is important to
understand it isn’t Psycho set in
Nineteenth century Iowa. Instead, it is a procedural with an investigation,
which is performed in a manner that fits the era, and the story of a young
woman performing what was then a male-only job.

The novel’s center is Anna. She
is bright and capable. A student of the famous French detective Goron’s methods—careful
crime scene examination, interrogation—which she uses to solve the crime. It is
also sentimental, tender, and very human. The descriptions of Cedar Rapids are
perceptive and bright. Fuller, his life and addictions, is drawn with a
tenderness that avoids pity and engenders understanding.